Click here to read Reproductive Technologies 101, an overview of reproductive technologies

The old stereotype of the gold-digging hussy who gets pregnant to trap a man into marriage seems to have faded, probably because women are not as economically dependent on men as they once were. But that’s not to say that pregnancy is no longer being wielded as a weapon: researchers who work in family planning and with victims of domestic violence say it is women who are now being threatened with pregnancy by their partners. (TIME)

Journal of Applied Philosophy (Volume 27, Issue 3, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles include:

• “Emergency Contraception and Conscientious Objection” by J. Paul Kelleher, 290-304.

• “A Puzzle about Consent in Research and in Practice” by Eric Chwang, 258-272.

Now that the FDA has approved ella (ulipristal acetate), a prescription-only emergency contraceptive, the debate about whether to prescribe such drugs is moving back to the doctor’s office. With it comes ethical and legal questions for physicians, particularly those who object to emergency contraception for various reasons. (American Medical News)

Busy childless couples and even singles who cannot afford to take extended leaves are now shipping their children-in-the-making to state clinics to be implanted in the wombs of surrogates.

In a growing practice, embryos from the fertilised eggs and sperm of the couple are couriered in controlled cool conditions and delivered to infertility clinics which are then transferred into the surrogate mother’s womb! (The Times of India)

You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don’t have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors. As a bonus, many Indians speak English and Indian surrogate mothers are less likely to use illegal drugs. Plus medical standards in private hospitals are very high (not all good Indian doctors left in the brain drain). (Slate Magazine)

Bioethics (Volume 24, Issue 7, September 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Reproductive Tourism and the Quest for Global Gender Justice” by Anne Donchin, 323-332.
• “Care Ethics and the Global Practice of Commercial Surrogacy” by Jennifer A. Parks, 333–340.
• “Revisiting Child-Based Objections to Commercial Surrogacy” by Jason K.M. Hanna, 341-347.
• “Surrogacy: Donor Conception Regulation in Japan” by Yukari Semba, Chiungfang Chang, Hyunsoo Hong, Ayako Kamisato, Minori Kokado, and Kaori Muto, 348-357.
• “The Ethics of Intercountry Adoption: Why It Matters To Healthcare Providers and Bioethicists” by Sarah Jones, 358-364.
• “The Limits of Intimate Citizenship: Reproduction of Difference in Flemish-Ethiopian ‘Adoption Cultures’” by Katrien De Graeve, 265-372.

More Polish women are traveling abroad to have an abortion to bypass strict laws outlawing the practice in their overwhelmingly Catholic country, a pro-choice group said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Many of the donor sibling connections — about 7,300 of them including the Jacobsons and Clapoffs — have been made through the Donor Sibling Registry, a voluntary website that matches donor siblings based on identification numbers. Occasionally, the site brings the children and the donor together. (CNN)

The government of Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has reversed steps toward protecting women’s health and reproductive rights, and backtracked on its intention to guarantee access to legal abortions, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday. (New York Times)

A lot of interest has been generated by the possibility of deriving gametes from embryonic stem cells and bone marrow stem cells. These stem cell derived gametes may become useful for research and for the treatment of infertility. In this article we consider prospectively the ethical issues that will arise if stem cell derived gametes are used in the clinic, making a distinction between concerns that only apply to embryonic stem cell derived gametes and concerns that are also relevant for gametes derived from adult stem cells. [Premium (Health Care Analysis)]

Scientists as well as fertility doctors have long tried to figure out what makes a good egg that will produce a healthy embryo. It’s a particularly critical question for fertility doctors deciding which eggs isolated from a woman will produce the best embryos and, ultimately, babies. (PhysOrg)

Cameras were there taping her birth in 1981, and three days later she was the star of her first press conference, with her face on every newspaper and news station in America. But Elizabeth Comeau doesn’t want her new son to have the same world welcoming. (FOX News)

Developing World Bioethics (Volume 10, Issue 2, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “The Future of Bioethics” by Udo Schüklenk, ii-iii.
• “Reproductive Tourism in Argentina: Clinic Accreditation and its Implications for Consumers, Health Professionals and Policy Makers” by Elsie Smith, Jason Behrmann, Carolina Martin, and Bryn Williams-Jones, 59-69.
• “Curriculum Guide for Research Ethics Workshops for Countries in the Middle East” by Henry Silverman, Babiker Ahmed, Samar Ajeilet, Sumaia Al-Fadil, Suhail Al-Amad, Hadir El-Dessouky, Ibrahim El-Gendy, Mohamed El-Guindi, Mustafa El-Nimeiri, Rana Muzaffar, and Azza Saleh, 70-77.
• “Access to Treatment in HIV Prevention Trials: Perspectives from a South African Community” by Nicola Barsdorf, Suzanne Maman, Nancy Kass, and Catherine Slack, 78-87.
• “Training Needs Assessment in Research Ethics Evaluation Among Research Ethics Committee Members in Three African Countries: Cameroon, Mali, and Tanzania” by Jêrôme Ateudjieu, John Willians, Marie Hirtle, Cédric Baume, Joyce Ikingura, Alassane Niaré, and Dominique Sprumont, 88-98.
• “From Medical Rationing to Rationalizing the Use of Human Resources for AIDS Care and Treatment in Africa: A Case for Task Shifting” by Jessica Price and Agnes Binagwaho, 99-103.
• “You Can Use My Name; You Don’t Have to Steal My Story - A Critique of Anonymity in Indigenous Studies” by Anna-Lydia Svalastog and Stefan Eriksson, 104-110.

Book Reviews Include:

• “Bioethics and Armed Conflict: Moral Dilemmas of Medicine and War - By Michael L. Gross” by Deanne-Peter Baker, 113.
• “When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects - By Adriana Petryna” by Stuart Rennie, 114-115.

NEJM (Volume 363, Number 3, July 15, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Facing the Wild West of Health Care Reform - Donal Berwick, Pioneer” by J.K. Iglehart.
• “Disclosing Industry Relationships - Toward an Improved Federal Research Policy” by E.G. Campbell and D.E. Zinner.
• “The Renaissance in HIV Vaccine Development - Future Directions” by W.C. Koff and S.F. Berkley.
• “The Havasupai Indian Tribe Case - Lessons for Research Involving Stored Biologic Samples” by M.M. Mello and L.E. Wolf, 204-207.
• “Becoming a Physician: The Case for Primary Care - A Medical Student’s Perspective” by I. Ganguli, 207-209.
• “Case 21-2010L A Request for Retrieval of Oocytes from a 36-Year-Old Woman with Anoxic Brain Injury” by D.M. Greer, A.K. Styer, T.L. Toth, C.P. Kindregan, and J.M. Romero, 27-283.
• “Drug Management of Obesity - Efficacy versus Safety” by A. Astrup, 288-290.
• “Trajectories of Disability in the Last Year of Life,” 294-295.
• “Advance Directives and Surrogate Decision Making Before Death,” 295-296.

The L.A.-based sperm bank offers an option to prospective parents of seeing which celebrity a donor looks like. That’s just silly. (Los Angeles Times)

A fertility clinic in Spain is offering patients the option of using embryos ‘left-over’ from previous treatments without the donors’ explicit consent, the Telegraph reports. The Instituto Marques clinic near Barcelona, which provides fertility treatment to foreign couples, runs an ‘embryo adoption scheme’ whereby patients can adopt an embryo which has been left behind by couples who have not decided whether to donate it to other patients, to research, or to destroy it. (BioNews)

Hundreds of leftover IVF embryos from British couples have been given away to other people without their knowledge or explicit consent, in a controversial scheme at a clinic in Spain, it can be disclosed. (Telegraph)

A Melbourne couple is suing the Royal Women’s Hospital for damages because doctors failed to diagnose their unborn daughter with Down Syndrome, denying them the choice to have an abortion. (ABC News)

U.S. researchers have developed a formula that can predict whether fertility treatment will succeed more accurately than using age alone, and used it to develop a commercial test. (Reuters)

What do we, as a society, owe to the resulting children, especially when we are complicit in their coming into being, by approving and funding the technologies used to create them? They are the people most profoundly and directly affected. They will live their lives as “donor-conceived adults,” “genetic orphans,” as many of them call themselves. (THE MARK)

Can it be ethical to give girl fetuses a drug to prevent ambiguous genitalia when the drug may also influence their sexual preferences in later life? The US researchers involved reject the idea of using the drug to “treat” homosexuality. (New Scientist)